I think the two biggest disappointments to me whilst working at Betfair were firstly when they launched the Casino and secondly when Betfair disbanded the Education team. The first was purely a money grab and for me went against what Betfair was all about at the time. Even as a shareholder at the time it felt that it was a very ugly decision and really just paved the way for all the decisions made since. It started with exchange games before the casino was fully launched. When the casino launched the peer to peer aspect of Betfair was gone.
The second disappointment was when the Education team was disbanded. At the time Scott Ferguson was in charge of the team and did a great job taking the van around the country promoting the Betfair product. Hugely knowledgeable. Despite the odd mishap (aka fire) the Education team was incredibly underappreciated and to this day I don’t think Betfair realise what they did. Their role was two fold.
Firstly to try and show new customers (who had previously just used bookies) how Betfair and exchanges worked. Secondly, they would try and help make the more basic exchange customers into a more sophisticated user of exchanges. The Betfair ecosystem (all the different backers and layers) is an incredibly complicated one. Betfair realised pretty early on that the biggest and most successful players were taking too much money out of that ecosystem. Hence the Premium Charges being introduced. The justification was that it would spend that money bringing more recreational players to the site.
However, with no Education team explaining how exchanges worked and how they were different to bookmakers I would question the effectiveness of that campaign (and willingness from BF). With less recreational players on Betfair it has increasingly become shark vs shark. People have to be educated as to the benefits of exchanges and just as importantly how to take the next steps to becoming smarter punters. If you increase the education and knowledge of the lesser players they may still lose, but will lose at a slower rate. This benefits the exchange in particular as the longer a player takes to lose their money the higher the commission they are likely to pay. Not only that but they help to provide crucial liquidity into markets. It all has a cyclical effect.
By removing the Education team all Betfair did was help to increase the gap between the sharks and the other newer players. The value of those newer players was worth so much less than they should have been. A very short sighted move to save a few pounds.
ProPunting 